Many composers during those years were attracted by ideas derived from the quasi-Marxist concept of mass appeal. Their ideas of a cultural democracy drove them toward a type of music which consciously aimed at pleasure for the greatest number. Such ideas suited the aims of the music business, which, with the help of business ideologies, encouraged these endeavors.
The music produced, however, bore no longer a specific relationship to jazz, which latter continued to develop along the lines normal to any product that has become an article of mass consumption, a variable product excluding neither imagination nor musical talent, but always remaining a genre and, by reason of its inherent restriction, never becoming a style. The features which once attracted attention by now had been absorbed into the contemporary musical vocabulary to which jazz could make no further contributions. Jazz, on the other hand, takes the materials of contemporary music, adopts those of its technical methods it can absorb and transforms them for its own uses. Infinitely more than even in the case of “serious” music, the composition and performance of popular music are controlled by commercial interests representing millions of dollars; in the economy of music business this fact constitutes a chapter in itself.
The “serious” composers during the thirties were attracted by the two tendencies which years before had dominated the European musical scene: the neoclassic tendency, and that which is roughly summarized as Gebrauchsmusik, literally utility music. In Europe, these tendencies were closely allied since one term implies an aesthetic, the other a practical purpose, and since they have the impulse toward new simplicity and a new relationship with the public as a common basis. As a result, neoclassicism, aiming at a clear and accessible profile and derived from more or less self-conscious evocations of music of the past, efficiently served as an idiomatic medium appropriate to the purposes of utility music. In the United States, explicit “returns” to this or that style or composer were few, and the neoclassic tendency was by no means always connected with a drive toward better relations with the public. Widely adopted, however, was a radical diatonicism, in the last analysis derived from the neoclassic phase of Stravinsky and adapted to utilitarian ends (as in music for film or ballet by Aaron Copland or Virgil Thomson), to fantastic and parodistic purposes (as in the opera Four Saints in Three Acts of Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein), or to “absolute” music as in certain sonatas and symphonies of Aaron Copland.
The name Copland is always present when one speaks of the differing tendencies within the development of the past forty years. A large share of the various phases through which our music has passed during these decades is summed up in his work. He not only passed through them himself, but guided many young composers as friend and mentor. Notwithstanding his manifold transformations—and it is altogether possible that there are more to come—he has remained a strong and well-defined personality, easily recognizable in the differing profiles his music has assumed.
This final section, while of necessity dealing with the author of this book, will not engage in a polemic against the ideas outlined on the preceding pages. The bases and motives of these ideas have constituted part also of this author’s experience, and he has tested them, as the Germans say, am eigenen Leib, and has tried to present them in such a manner as to demonstrate that they were inevitable phases of American culture.
But there is more. If we nourish the hope of surmounting the dangerous crisis through which western culture is presently passing, we must make clear distinctions, and if we wish to surmount the particular, so to speak, accessory crisis of American musical maturity, we must not lose sight of the difference between ideas of an aesthetic or sociological nature on the one hand, and, on the other, the individual works of art which supposedly embody them. The valid works and personalities are infinitely more complex than the ideas which constitute merely one of many components.
At the same time, ideas influence not only the conscious efforts of composers, not only the criteria and the judgments of critics, but they influence, in the United States far more than in Europe, education and the general tenor of music life. Repeated mention has been made of a predilection, in the American mode of thought, for abstraction. This tendency derives from the necessity of building, fast, a foundation where a strong, complex influence of ancient tradition is lacking. Other peoples are inclined toward abstraction, too, but in comparison at least with Europe, here the ascendancy of certain concepts, ideas, and personalities is, at least on the surface, nearly uncontested. Equally striking is the finality, at times not as real as it may seem, with which the same concept, idea or personality can be superseded.
These processes may be observed in many aspects of American life; and the concern with which they are viewed by those following the currents of opinion, is well known. However, countercurrents exist, frequently lost from view even when they are strongest. With the full glare of publicity concentrated on whatever is momentarily in the ascendance, countercurrents easily grow in quasi-silence and emerge at the appointed moment with a strength disconcerting to those not acquainted with the processes of American life (which often seems to run from one extreme to the other): therefore it is good to remain aware of the strength, real or potential, of opposition.
What we term countercurrents to the manifold tendencies heretofore discussed, may already in part have superseded former attitudes, and in part may become dominant at the present time. Countercurrents continually attract a large number of gifted and intelligent young musicians who regard cultural nationalism with irony, as a formula too facile to constitute a definitive solution of our musical problems. They look with irony at the quest for audience appeal, which to them lacks musical conviction, even though occasionally it may be motivated by certain social beliefs. They are restive under the older attitudes aimed at helping the American composer as a matter of principle. They feel that such aims do not imply necessity, real desire, respect for, or interest in, the music Americans are writing, and to which they give all the resources they possess.